W. E. B. Du Bois was one of the major figures in the struggle for human rights both in the United States and worldwide. A founder of both the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the Pan-African movement, he was the controversial editor of The Crisis, the journal of the NAACP; a pioneer in the sociological study of African Americans; a revisionist historian; and the author of four autobiographies, five novels, and many poems, plays, and essays. At the heart of all of his work was a concern for the social and cultural significance of race and class.

Born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, at the beginning of the Reconstruction period, William Edward Burghardt Du Bois grew up in an African American family that had been free since the American Revolution on his mother's side and for at least...